March 14, 2012

Teens and Television: The Facts

One of the characteristics of marketing professionals that makes them so insufferably dim is their obsession with young people.

The fact that over 75% of the wealth of this country is in the hands of people over 50 makes absolutely no difference to them. The fact that young people have no money and are terrible customers means nothing.

They always give you the same answer: "Yeah, but our customers are growing old and where are our new customers going to come from?" As if people at 50 wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, and eat the same food they do at 17.

It's just another offshoot of the idiotic "lifetime value" delusion that assumes once you get a customer you have her for life.

Because of this obsession, the media habits of young people are especially fascinating to marketing people.

Every time I write something about the resiliency of TV, I get very predictable comments from knuckleheads who think they understand young people and want to explain their behaviors to me.

They tell me how Luddite dinosaurs like me just don't get it. They say that, sure TV is still popular with old farts, but young people have no interest in it and are spending their time with Facebook and YouTube and mobile devices and couldn't care less about TV.

Of course, their arguments usually turn out to be ad hominem nonsense with no data to confirm their assertions. But that never bothers them.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."